from the history-is-on-the-side-of-innovation dept

The future is positive, a dream. Focus on the future. Use science to stay ahead.

Those words didn't come from a tech-sector legend – not Steve Jobs or Bill Gates – or newcomer like Mark Zuckerberg. That wisdom about nurturing the previously unimaginable and embracing what technology offers came from a visionary of a different sort.

I heard Shimon Peres share this insight during my visit to the Peres Center for Peace in June, just three months before the former Israeli president and prime minister died. He saw innovation and technology as improving the world – a force for good that can break down borders, both national and political.

Peres' vision stands in stark contrast to Lord Jonathan Sacks' dystopian commentary calling computers and radical Islamists the "two dangers" of this century, defeated only by "an insistence on the dignity of the human person and the sanctity of human life."

On the contrary, I believe innovation and technology will help defeat terrorists and sustain and enhance human life.

While Sacks decries the idea of self-driving cars, this innovation can save tens of thousands of lives a year in the U.S. alone. More than 35,000 people died on our roads last year, and the federal government estimates over 90 percent of crashes are caused by human error. Eliminating the great majority of automobile deaths and serious injuries would certainly meet Sacks' goal of preserving "the sanctity of human life."

The rabbi also frets technology will threaten "the dignity of the human person." Apparently, he hasn't considered the dignity self-driving cars will deliver to seniors and persons with disabilities, providing them with previously unimagined freedom and independence. The ability to read road signs or react quickly to traffic will no longer be needed to travel alone by car.

Similarly, Sacks fears doctors will be replaced by robots with artificial intelligence. However, if health care models remain unchanged, the U.S. may face a shortage of 124,000 physicians by 2025. Virtual care solutions – wireless health devices and telemedicine technology – will increasingly allow Americans to see doctors only when necessary.

Tech-enabled remote care also would remove much of the burden of traveling to see a doctor, reducing congestion on roads and easing the strain on caregivers. With 10,000 Americans turning 65 every day, this developing technology is a mitzvah – a gift or miracle, which will provide life and good health. Innovations in healthcare technologies could help resolve an emerging healthcare crisis – they need to be embraced, not feared.

I understand Rabbi Sacks' dual concerns about the growing use of technology threatening both our jobs and our connections with one other. But every major innovation from the wheel to the factory to the car to the internet radically affected how people work. Certain jobs were lost, yes, but new jobs were created.

More, people lived longer as they ate better, stayed healthier and gained greater access to knowledge. Innovation and the myriad benefits it brings allow us to ascend the Maslow hierarchy of needs, from survival with food and shelter to love and satisfying relationships.

The issue remains whether our love affair with technology and fascination with "things" mean we're sacrificing our humanity – choosing the devices in our hands over the people in our midst. Look around a restaurant at dinner and witness seas of quiet people looking at devices. But are devices worse than alcohol, drugs, gambling or anything in excess?

As parents, we should set limits and an example. As adults, we should enjoy the five-sense experience of the people around us, and let these wonders of technology be tools for living rather than our near total life experience.

As President Peres explained to me in June, big data will deliver a new age of being able to predict – and predictability will change and improve the world. I recall him saying, Four thousand years of commandments will keep the morality. Sixty-eight years of Israel will keep innovations coming. His goal for the Center for Peace is to become a center of innovation.

Technology is changing our lives for the better – enhancing our security, removing human error from our roads, reducing trips to the doctor and cutting our workload. In doing so, it improves the sanctity and dignity of human lives. And that is a blessing, not a curse.

In a world increasingly saturated with drones, there are two things that make the Fleye stand out. The first is its design: unlike most drones, it's not a quadcopter, but rather is powered by a single blade concealed entirely within its round outer shell. Aesthetically, this is just cool: the Fleye doesn't look like it should be able to hover and maneuver the way quadcopters do, but it is. Functionally, this serves a key purpose: if the goal is a future where small flying robots operate regularly in human-filled spaces, then the safety factor becomes a real concern, and little bumper rings around exposed high-speed blades simply isn't going to cut it. The Fleye has nothing on the outside that can hurt you — and watching it gracefully recover after being bumped or shoved is delightful.

The second notable aspect is that the Fleye is focused on being a platform for developers. The creator clearly has a vision of a future full of small autonomous and semi-autonomous drones, hovering over our shoulders and running errands for us and taking our selfies for us — but he also gives the clear impression that he knows this future isn't "right around the corner" and, in fact, may never even arrive in the vague way we envision it. Rather, he wants to offer a real opportunity for people to explore and experiment in that direction. The Fleye has WiFi, an HD camera, and an on-board computer available in two different models: one with a dual-core and half-gig of RAM, the other with a quad-core and a full gigabyte. All this is wrapped up with an API and an SDK that lets developers create autonomous tasks for the Fleye, leveraging its ability to recognize its surroundings and make split-second adjustments to its course. The Fleye itself, as it is right now, probably isn't the drone that goes mainstream and starts appearing everywhere — but it may well be the platform that trains the generation of developers who go on to achieve that dream.

The Bad

Drones still face some severe technology limitations, and the Fleye is no exception. For one thing, though the video isn't entirely clear on this point, it surely makes the same loud and somewhat grating noise that we were all disappointed by the first time we saw a drone flying in person rather than doing graceful silent maneuvers in an audio-dubbed video. Secondly, it still has the limitation of a 10-minute flight time on a full battery charge. Neither of these things are the fault of the Fleye itself, but they do represent technological bottlenecks that diminish the usefulness and appeal of personal drones in general.

The Platform

By default, the Fleye is controlled solely by apps for iOS and Android. Normally this is a very irritating choice, but in the case of the Fleye, it's actually just a starting point: the drone is controlled by WiFi through an API that uses JSON-over-UDP, meaning virtually any WiFi-connected device is capable of become a controller. The creator is working on SDKs for iOS, Android, NodeJS and Python so people can begin creating their own control software for any and all devices. But that's just for remote control — the Fleye itself runs on Linux and can be accessed via SSH, deploying custom software directly to the drone so it can then operate autonomously or semi-autonomously to complete tasks you've designed. Custom apps don't need to train the drone from the ground up, as a low-level API within the Linux environment gives custom software easy access to the autopilot functions and video pipeline.

With all these capabilities, I'm excited to see what developers start creating once they get their hands on the Fleye.

"The proposed rules "are more progressive than we expected," said Michael Drobac, executive director of the Small UAV Coalition, a trade group that represents drone makers, including Amazon.com Inc. and Google Inc. "But once you spend some time looking at them, some of the things proposed would be devastating to the future of the industry."

According to the FAA fact sheet and the actual rules (pdf), the rules require direct line of sight (read: a human on the ground) and forbid nighttime use:

"Specifically, the FAA is proposing to add a new part 107 to Title 14 Code of Federal Regulations (14 CFR) to allow for routine civil operation of small UAS in the NAS and to provide safety rules for those operations. Consistent with the statutory definition, the proposed rule defines small UAS as those UAS weighing less than 55 pounds. To mitigate risk, the proposed rule would limit small UAS to daylight-only operations, confined areas of operation, and visual-line-of-sight operations."

The rules also note that drone users can't fly their drones faster than 100 mph, or higher than 500 feet. Drones also can't be flown over major population masses, which outlaws pretty much all operation in most urban environments. While a lot of hobbyist uses remain unimpaired, once you start to add up the restrictions it becomes clear that the proposed rules pretty much ban any of the drone delivery ambitions held by companies like Amazon or Google. Commenting to The Guardian, Amazon was quick to threaten that they'll just take their Amazon drone delivery ambitions to countries with more progressive drone rules in play:

"The FAA needs to begin and expeditiously complete the formal process to address the needs of our business, and ultimately our customers," Paul Misener, Amazon vice-president of gobal public policy, said in a statement to the Guardian. “We are committed to realising our vision for Prime Air and are prepared to deploy where we have the regulatory support we need."

I personally always thought Amazon's drone delivery ambitions had more than a small component of hot air, designed predominately to help give the PR impression of intense innovation. I'm a tough sell on the practicality of urban drone delivery anyway; in my head I've always imagined a very dystopian Terry Gilliam-esque affair, where bands of hooligans construct increasingly elaborate steampunk slingshots to shoot down drones, street urchins then scurrying in rapt alleyway pursuit of Prime deliveries and pepperoni pizzas. Then again maybe I'm just being too cynical, and this cat and mouse criminality opens up an entire world of drone delivery security countermeasure-driven business models I've not even thought of.

Of course with the FAA banning night and urban use, we're talking about a lot more than just Google and Amazon's ambitions getting curtailed. Surveillance and the government's use of drones is also obviously a concern. Alongside the new rule proposals the White House issued Presidential memorandum requiring government agencies to detail the time and location of drone operations (though what loopholes are carved out for intelligence and law enforcement remains unclear). Drone operators that take taxpayer money will also need to clearly document what's being done with collected data.

It's worth reiterating that these are just draft rules and we've still got a public comment period that could extend the already-delayed drone rule making process another two years. By the time the public and companies get done hammering away at them over the next few years, we may actually wind up with rules far better than most people ever imagined.

from the ridiculous dept

As we've been covering for a while now, the FAA is doing everything it can to delay nearly all commercial use of drones, despite the many possible innovations drones can lead to. Are there some legitimate safety concerns? Absolutely, but the FAA's approach of "ban everything" and then drip out a few exemptions here and there is problematic. Last year, we wrote about a key test case, involving Raphael Pirker, in which a judge declared that the FAA's ban on drones was illegal (mostly for procedural reasons). A few months ago, that got overturned... and now Pirker and the FAA have settled the matter, with Pirker agreeing to pay $1,100 [pdf] while not admitting to any wrong doing:

Respondent agrees to pay $1,100.00 (the "settlement proceeds") by January 22, 2015, to the FAA in full and final settlement of this matter.

[....]

It is understood and agreed that neither the Respondent's execution of this settlement agreement nor payment of the settlement proceeds constitutes Respondent's admission of any of the facts or regulatory violations alleged in the FAA's June 27, 2013 Order of Assessment or the Amended Order of Assessment that will issue pursuant to this settlement agreement.

From a financial perspective, I'm sure it makes sense for Pirker to settle this agreement for $1,100, rather than having to pay a lot more to go to court. But for the rest of us, this kind of sucks. It would have been good to have at least been able to test whether or not the FAA's rules are really legal. Or, at the very least, put more pressure on the FAA to stop dragging its feet and to start issuing actual rules that allow drones to be used for commercial purposes. The longer we wait, the more likely it is we cede innovation on this important area to other countries.

from the letting-innovation-fly-away dept

Drones are leaving the U.S. for greener pastures, according to several media outlets (e.g., WSJ and Bloomberg). In response to slow-moving U.S. domestic policy on commercial drone use, innovators are moving abroad, to jurisdictions where regulations have been updated to delineate when drones may be used in the commercial context. (Keep in mind, we are not talking about fixed wing Predator drones with Hellfire missiles, but aircraft that are already available commercially with much of the same technology already incorporated into our mobile phones.) Besides smaller companies actually moving abroad to places where they can sell their wares, even the likes of Google and Amazon have moved their drone testing to Australia and India, respectively.

Making matters worse, export control policies are poorly targeted, and prevent some drones made with widely available technology built in the United States from being sold overseas. In fact, according to the Wall Street Journal, 3D Robotics — a San Diego-based company that specializes in drones with video capability — was only allowed to resume selling some of its products in a number of countries because the drones were manufactured in Mexico:

Export rules prompted 3D Robotics to temporarily halt shipments to 44 countries this spring. It has since secured a new classification from the U.S. Commerce Department, in part because it manufactures its drones in Mexico, allowing it to resume foreign sales.

And for those inclined to view this as a minor development in a niche market, at least one study predicts that allowing commercial drone use in the United States could create 100,000 new jobs and $82 billion in economic impact over the course of the next decade.

A lot of smart people have already said a lot of smart things about the drone situation, so I won't delve too deeply into the nuances of streamlining commercial drone policy making. Clearly, there are good reasons why commercial drones can't take to the sky without some rules, but it is imperative that regulators move efficiently to establish a framework where, for example, a real estate agent or a surveyor can survey a property with a drone (in the same way it is currently legal for a non-commercial user to fly an off-the-shelf drone in her backyard). That is not happening now. According to the Department of Transportation's own Inspector General, the FAA is likely to miss its Congressionally mandated deadline in coming up with rules that allow for the expansion of commercial drone use.

There's a general point here worth expanding on: even if a country does everything right, creating a fertile environment for research, investment, and innovation (aka the hard stuff), innovation will nevertheless move overseas if outdated regulations impede the lawful sale or use of a product or service. It does not matter if the United States has the brightest minds, best expertise and easiest access to venture capital; if you can't sell, test or export drones here, then we will see those jobs and that talent go overseas to more fertile ground. In fact, this is already happening. And even if the FAA eventually comes up with a workable set of regulations that allow commercial drone activity, in fast moving industries — where first mover advantage is enormous — bureaucratic delays can be terminal.

Take Japan in the 1990s. Japan was a high-tech giant. In the early 1990s, both the U.S. and Japan had companies interested in innovating in online search engines. However, Japan's highly restrictive set of copyright laws meant that in order to index a website you had to get the website owner's permission first. When there are a couple hundred or a couple thousand websites, this is feasible. But clearly, this does not scale. Fortunately for U.S. innovators, the U.S. had copyright "fair use" enshrined into law, which allowed transformative uses of copyrighted content. This paved the way for U.S. search engine entrepreneurs, while the Japanese search sector never got off the ground. Even though Japan eventually updated its copyright law to make search engines legal (in 2007!), it was too late. As of today, U.S. search providers (Yahoo Japan and Google) have well over 90% of the Japanese search market.

The "crypto wars" of the 1990s are also a place to look for a parallel to the drone fight. Until 1992, the U.S. government imposed very strict export controls on cryptography. Although the export of strong encryption technology was viewed by many in the law enforcement and national security communities as detrimental to their missions, the rise of electronic commerce greatly increased the need for robust encryption in commercial products and Internet services. What followed was a long drawn out battle in which encryption proponents focused on several key arguments, including the logistical problems with trying to prevent the export of programming concepts, the widespread availability of cryptography internationally and free speech concerns. Another angle, which tied in with the ease of moving cryptographical research overseas, was that innovation in the U.S. would be harmed as much software engineering would be forced to move overseas in order to get around the onerous U.S. restrictions — restrictions that would have little actual effect on the worldwide availability of cryptography. Jon Peha, a professor at Carnegie Mellon who would later go on to be the Assistant Director of the White House's Office of Science and Technology policy, outlined some of the competitiveness concerns in a paper he wrote on encryption policy in 1998:

Industry critics argued that the restrictions accomplished little, since 128 bit encryption without key escrow is already readily available outside the US. An April 1998 report from the Economic Strategy Institute concluded that the policies imposed at that time (i.e. the 1996 interim policy) would cost the US economy between 35 and 96 billion dollars between 1998 and 2002. Some US companies have overcome these limitations by purchasing foreign products or shifting development activities overseas. For example, in March 1998, Network Associates announced that it would begin contracting all encryption development to a Swiss company.

By 2000, U.S. restrictions were sufficiently relaxed and the sale of software with encryption technology in it was made significantly easier. However, in certain situations export controls still apply, and the process for complying with them is still relatively byzantine. (And, with the recent NSA scandal and the fallout, we might be heading towards the Crypto Wars II.) To this day, there is still significant discussion on how the remaining export controls affect national competitiveness. (See European Commission Document on Export Controls, page 7.)

Churning out smart engineers and cultivating venture capital is not enough to succeed in a competitive globalized world. Policy bandwidth needs to be devoted to clearing unnecessary hurdles to commercializing and exporting the fruits of that innovation. Although Europe's "innovation policy" is lagging the U.S., countries like Germany are ascending to the lead in drone innovation because people can actually use drones commercially and export them to other countries. If a company cannot achieve the sales base necessary to scale their business, then they cannot continue to innovate.

Going forward, we should not just think of the other domestic policy fights in a vacuum. Take Tesla, for example. They are succeeding in producing commercially attractive electric vehicles where so many other companies have failed: a public policy and economic triumph that has been nearly universally lauded. Yet, they face sales bans or restrictions in over half of the states in the U.S based on a set of outdated and widely criticized auto dealer regulations. As the company continues to scale, and as foreign markets grow and more consumers worldwide fall into the crosshairs of Tesla's salespeople, an unnecessarily restrained domestic market will only force the company to locate more infrastructure and talent overseas than they otherwise would in the first place.

In the Tesla and drone cases, we got the hard stuff right. The United States fostered an innovative and dynamic economy that unleashed a wave on entrepreneurship and innovation. Now, much like the situation in immigration policy where we are pushing some of our best and brightest minds overseas, slow moving regulators and policymakers are forcing some of our nation's most dynamic companies overseas as well.

from the the-government....-and-a-bunch-of-other-factors dept

We've talked a bit about some more intriguing uses of drone technology lately, including personal individual surveillance as well as for building floating ad hoc networks. But I don't think I've ever seen as much attention given to the potential disruptive nature of drone technology as the story that's been bouncing around the internet the past few days concerning the miraculous concept of the TacoCopter.

Yes, the TacoCopter, one of those ideas that once you hear about it, it sticks with you. It's pretty straightforward. You order (and pay for) a taco via a smartphone app, indicating your location, and a short while later, a drone hums into view and drops a taco at your feet. The folks behind it are targeting San Francisco first (of course), with an expansion plan that includes "TacoLobster" "LobsterCopter" on the east coast.

While some have insisted it's a joke, the folks behind it insist that it's real... except for the fact that it isn't really real. It's not a joke, it's just not quite feasible. Or legal. The legal part is the the one that's getting the most attention. As the founders explained to Jason Gilbert at the Huffington Post, you can't actually use drones for commercial purposes these days:

"Current U.S. FAA regulations prevent ... using UAVs [Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, like drones] for commercial purposes at the moment," Simpson said over Gchat. "Honestly I think it's not totally unreasonable to regulate something as potentially dangerous as having flying robots slinging tacos over people's heads ... [O]n the other hand, it's a little bit ironic that that's the case in a country where you can be killed by drone with no judicial review."

Of course, that's not the only problem. There's also... well, everything else. Which turns out to be a pretty long list.

Simpson told HuffPost that because of the FAA's regulations -- as well as other minor problems, like navigating the treacherous terrain of an urban environment, keeping the food warm, finding a city map precise enough to avoid crashes 100 percent of the time, avoiding birds, balconies and telephone wires, delivering food to people indoors, delivering food to the right person, dealing with greedy humans who would just steal the Tacocopter as soon as it got to them, etc.

Not surprisingly, the team behind it isn't actively working on the project right now, though they still seem to insist they're serious about doing it for real at some point in the future.

That said, it's not hard to realize that most of these problems can and will be solved at some point in the future, and such a commercial use of drones could actually create quite disruptive business models in a lot of sectors. Obviously, just delivering tacos isn't that big of a deal, but once you begin to realize that these things can deliver almost anything (within reasonable weight limits) then it starts to open up a huge world of interesting possibilities. For that reason, it wouldn't surprise me to see that the regulations that now limit such uses of drone technology will almost certainly remain in effect much longer than the technological limitations remain a hurdle. Those who are disrupted by such uses will continue to insist that such things are dangerous, rather than learning to adapt and embrace the technology.

from the the-pirate-ships-continue-to-go dept

One of the more amazing things about the recent moves by the entertainment industry to put in place stricter laws around the globe to attack file sharing, is that they still don't realize how pointless this is compared to the only real solution, which is to offer more of what consumers actually want, rather than trying to force them into some old way of doing business. For every "victory" the industry declares, we see more and more evidence that the file sharing just moves further away from what the industry can control (and keeps growing). The Pirate Bay, of course, has always been one of the leaders in mocking the legacy entertainment industry as it continues to operate, despite years-long efforts to shut it down. And even as there are reports of new raids pending, the organization has shifted to magnet links, meaning that taking it down will be even more meaningless than in the past.

One of the technical things we always optimize is where to put our front machines. They are the ones that re-direct your traffic to a secret location. We have now decided to try to build something extraordinary.

With the development of GPS controlled drones, far-reaching cheap radio equipment and tiny new computers like the Raspberry Pi, we're going to experiment with sending out some small drones that will float some kilometers up in the air. This way our machines will have to be shut down with aeroplanes in order to shut down the system. A real act of war.

We're just starting so we haven't figured everything out yet. But we can't limit ourselves to hosting things just on land anymore. These Low Orbit Server Stations (LOSS) are just the first attempt. With modern radio transmitters we can get over 100Mbps per node up to 50km away. For the proxy system we're building, that's more than enough.

Whether or not they can actually pull it off is a totally different question, but as we've been discussing recently, drone technology is getting cheaper, and the potential disruption of the Raspberry Pi should not be underestimated. While such things might not really be ready yet to do what TPB hopes to do, it's not difficult to project these trends out just a little ways to see that not only will it be possible in the not-too-distant future, but it would be a surprise if we didn't see setups that go way beyond what TPB is currently proposing before too long.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Biomimicry for robot design is a fascinating area of research, and all kinds of interesting robots are being developed that almost look like natural creatures. Here are just a few more examples of machines that are adopting biologically-inspired features.